Americans will be familiar with the hunt-the-needle-in-the-haystack approach of the State and Justice Departments in looking for victims of human trafficking. Jerry Markon exposed the hiatus between the actual evidence and the claims in an article in the Washington Post. The resources utilised for the yield obtained resembled the hunt for weapons of mass destruction.

The equivalent in the United Kingdom is the Police and UK Human Trafficking Centre operations known as Pentameter. This week's release of figures from the second operation triggered off the predictable moral panic and demand for more funding to combat this terrible menace. When Benjamin Disraeli decried the mesmerising effects of numbers "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics" he may have been considering this sort of agenda driven political spin. 

Dr Petra Boynton of the University of London has performed a great service by exposing the complete muddle of figures bandied around in the media , and the stark gap in credibility revealed by the numbers of victims 'found' and 'rescued' compared to the claimed. To place this in perspective, the UK Home Office estimated that in 2003 there were 80,000 sex workers in in the country. At that time the Government estimated 4,000 (5%) were victims of trafficking, although the Joint Committee on Human Rights could find no credibility in these estimates.  The first series of raids in 2005 allegedly netted 88 (out of 188 initially 'rescued') victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation from 515 premises, although there are doubts as to the actual identity of these people, their working conditions and means of entry to the UK, and whether they simply drifted back again after deportation. The second series of raids (Pentameter 2) has apparently 'rescued' a further 167 victims (how many are actually trafficked is unknown) with enormous effort, from an even higher number of establishments (822) suggesting either a drop in efficiency or that the first raids actually removed most of the problem. Even a conservative estimate suggests that therefore the number of trafficked women in sex work in the United Kingdom was closer to one fifth of a percent rather than 5%.

Yet despite the relative lack of evidence the estimates of the total number have escalated to 16,000 (20%). Other observers have suggesterd up to 25,000 (31%). As Professor Julia O'Conell Davidson   asserts, the police would need to raid up to 150,000 premises at this rate to find these alleged victims, yet there are only a few thousand in existance at most. Finally the media have succeded in conflating occasional reports of under age sex work into the concept that countless thousands of children are being imported into the UK to meet an apparently insatiable demand by British men and tourists for pedophilia. Predictably this has led to yet further demands to support the Government's other strategy, the criminalisation of the purchase of sexual services. 

While mathematical legere du main is helpful for securing funding for political campaigns and 'rescue' orientated charities, they do virtually nothing for victims of exploitation whether in the sex trade or any other form of systematic abuse. On the contrary they have the potential for doing a great deal of harm.

Related Articles

Teens and sex work

__________________________

Michael Goodyear